Bogeyman (16 page)

Sweet thought there was a difference between saying “I would never do anything like that” and “I didn’t do it.” He believed that deep down most people, even psychopaths like Penton, have a hard time lying without giving themselves away. By saying
“I wouldn’t do that”
instead of
“I didn’t do that,”
he was, in his mind, not truly lying.
Then, Penton slipped up again. They were talking about his drug use, and Penton told them he was addicted to crack and had in fact been using a lot of it while in Texas during the period of time in question. Suddenly, he said that it was possible he had committed murders, but if so he couldn’t remember because he was “too high.”

Sweet saw it as a confession. It was another way of saying “I would not do that if I was in my right mind,” or “I blacked out and don’t remember killing them.” That excuse had been used on him a lot over the years, as if the killers thought it made them seem less evil. He’d never believed it before and didn’t believe it now.

The interview progressed, with all four detectives shooting questions at the suspect. He didn’t have time to think before someone asked him another question. It could have been mass confusion, but there were four good detectives in the room who knew how to play off each other. They even talked about the “bag telephone” that his employer at the time of the Ibarra kidnapping, Wayne Welch, let him use when on the job. Rather than deny knowing anything about the phone, he described it just like Tiffany Ibarra had.

Bradshaw told Penton that he knew what happened to Christi Meeks. Since that day in January 1985, the detective had thought a lot about how the monster’s mind worked. He’d worked innumerable cases involving child sexual assault, read everything he could find on what made pedophiles tick, and interviewed dozens of suspects and obtained confessions from many of them. Sometimes it took what he thought of as
“crawling in the ditch with them,”
making them believe that he understood their attraction to young children; that anybody could have the same attraction, or that the child was to blame for
“coming on to them.”

That’s where he was headed when he told Penton, “I’ve been thinking about this for years and years, and what I think happened is you got her in the car, and then when you were having sex with her she started screaming. So you put your hand over her mouth and suffocated, or strangled, her.”

Bradshaw intended to crawl in the ditch, pretend he understood Penton’s vile thoughts and place the blame on Christi. Try to get him to confess by identifying with him. But as he spoke, he noticed how Penton had grown absolutely still, his eyes glazed over and a slight smile played across his thin lips.
He’s reliving it,
the detective thought.
He’s getting off on me telling the story
. Horrified, he stopped talking; he wasn’t getting in the ditch, he wasn’t willing to go there with this particular evil.

The room was absolutely quiet. Bradshaw waited for someone else to go forward in the same vein. But no one spoke; no one else was willing to crawl into that dark chasm with Penton.

This time, when the detectives again told him they would be taking him to Texas to die, Penton just shrugged. “Okay, then I guess I’ll die,” he said.

Without really knowing why he took the conversation in this direction, unless God was leading him, Sweet asked, “What do you think is going to happen to you after you die?”

Penton’s shrugged. “I’m right with God, so I’m not worried.”

Although he didn’t really believe it, Sweet told Penton that he believed that he was sincere in his beliefs. It was a hard thing to say because the detective could see right through him, but he wanted the killer to know that God could see through his lies, too.

Penton responded by declaring his innocence again. “I’m a man of God.”

Sweet sighed and shook his head. Prison authorities had warned the detectives not to get into religious debates with Penton, who, when not boasting about raping and killing children, apparently made a big show of reading the Bible and going to Bible-study classes.
“He’ll try to lure you into a discussion to sidetrack you.”

However, Sweet couldn’t stand listening to Penton’s religious claims any longer. He knew in his heart that Penton was an unrepentant child killer and a liar. Ever since his days as a patrol officer, he’d had plenty of experience dealing with criminals who tried to hide behind religion and jailhouse conversions. And as a deacon in his church and an interim youth minister who read his Bible regularly, he was more than capable of handling his own when it came to
“God talk.”
So he stepped out on faith, trusting that God would not let an evil man win this debate.

He began by saying about how much he loved the biblical story of King David and Bathsheba. How David had lusted after Bathsheba, a married woman, to the point where he sent the woman’s husband into battle knowing he would die. Meanwhile back in Jerusalem, David, now a murderer, and Bathsheba committed adultery. And that God had punished the couple by causing their newborn son to die. But that David had repented and God had forgiven him, and called him a man after God’s own heart, even having committed such serious sins.

As Sweet talked, Penton didn’t move. He just sat still, stared, and listened. Even the other detectives were quiet as Sweet spoke confidently and earnestly. “We know you killed these girls, but God will forgive you, and you can be a man after God’s own heart,” he said.

“But I didn’t kill them,” protested Penton, breaking his silence.

“David, you’re lying, and the Bible says that God hates a liar,” Sweet insisted. “I believe if you have repented these murders, that God will forgive you, just like he forgave King David. But not if you lie to cover up a sin.”

Penton looked dazed and at a loss for words. Long after this interview concluded, Sweet would believe that God was speaking through him, or at least helping him find the right words to say. When Penton again weakly insisted that he was innocent, the detective replied, “You can tell us that you’re innocent, and you can tell the judge that you’re innocent, but someday you will stand before another judge that you won’t be able to say that to; He knows everything you’ve done.”

Something clicked in Penton as he shouted, “We will all stand before God. All of us! And you may be standing with me!” He smiled as if he hit a home run at a ballpark.

Sweet nodded, his eyes locked on his opponent’s, as he calmly replied, “That’s right David, and those little girls will be standing with us, too.”

The color that had risen in Penton’s face drained away. He froze and just looked at Sweet for a long time, unable to speak. Then, he swallowed hard and bobbed his head. “Good,” he said, though his voice was subdued, defeated. “Then they can tell you I didn’t do it.”

After that, Penton seemed a beaten man, one who knew he couldn’t talk his way out of trouble this time. But Sweet wasn’t letting him off the ropes. Instead, he repeated the verse from Proverbs he’d responded with since his earliest days as a police officer when criminals tried to pull the God card on him. “
Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper,
but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy.”

On that note, it was over. Several intense hours had passed since they started, but now it was time to end it. Penton looked like a rat trapped in a corner by a terrier; his eyes darted around as if looking for a way to escape, and he couldn’t sit still.

“We’ll be waiting for you in Texas,” Sweet said again as he and the other detectives rose to leave. That’s how they left him: alone, knowing he would soon be facing a murder trial with the possibility of a death sentence.

A few minutes later, as the detectives walked out of the prison, Phillips, another born-again Christian police officer, looked at Sweet and grinned. “Dang, I was almost saved back there!”

They all had a good laugh. The train of justice for Roxann Reyes, Christi Meeks, and Christie Proctor was about to pull into the station, and it was time to celebrate.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

June 17, 2003

T
hree weeks after the bogeyman wet his pants when confronted by a pair of tenacious Texas lawmen, Sweet sat at his desk, waiting for a call, one that in a sense he’d been waiting to hear for seven years. The call to say whether Penton had been indicted in Collin County for the murders of Roxanne Reyes, Christi Meeks, and Christie Proctor.

He was confident the news would be good. He and his colleagues—Bradshaw, Phillips, and Meeks—had done their jobs; they’d put together a case he believed good enough not just to indict Penton, but to convict him. Any doubts he’d had went away after interviewing the killer. And they’d continued tracking down odds and ends up to the day Greg Davis took the evidence before a grand jury to ask them to indict Penton on capital murder charges.

In fact, right after talking to Penton, Sweet and Meeks drove to Minford, Ohio, to speak to Roxann’s aunt, Tanya. They were following up on the notes that Tim Creighton had given them about the young woman Penton said he’d visited on Timberline Street in Garland.

Creighton had misheard the street name as “Treeline,” but Sweet was convinced Timberline was correct and confirmed it through Roxann’s mother, Tammy. He told her about Creighton’s note, and she said that she’d lived on Timberline before moving to the apartment complex where her daughter was abducted. She also said that Roxann’s father, Sergio, as well as her sister, Tanya, had lived there with her.

Sweet had gone to the neighborhood and walked down the street, knocking on every single door, hoping to find the woman Penton had visited. But most of the people he talked to had not lived there in the mid-1980s, and no one recognized Penton from the photographs.

However, Sweet had a theory on the woman’s identity. As soon as Tammy said that her sister, Tanya, had also lived on Timberline, the thought crossed his mind that she was whom Penton and Creighton were referring to; he thought it was worth asking her anyway.

Arriving in Minford, the detectives called ahead and then drove to the neighborhood where Tanya lived. Sitting in the living room of her sparse home, the detectives asked the obviously nervous woman a few easy personal questions, but she wasn’t saying much.

Then, Sweet opened his file and showed her the same photo lineup he’d shown to Tiffany Ibarra. Tanya appeared to be looking hard at the photograph of Penton. Sweet and Meeks thought she was on the verge of pointing him out. But after more than a minute of looking at the photograph, she finally shook her head and said she didn’t recognize anyone. Disappointed, the detectives got back in their car for the long drive back to Columbus.

After four hours, they decided to stop and spend the night in Waverly. The next morning the detectives were preparing to get on the road to Columbus when they received a call from Marletta Scribner, an investigator with the Collin County DAO who’d traveled with the detectives to Columbus. She said she had just got off the telephone with Tammy Lopez. Apparently, her sister, Tanya, had called her after the detectives had left her house. In tears, Tanya admitted to Tammy that she had recognized one of the men in the photo lineup.

Sweet and Meeks headed back to Minford and Tanya’s house. This time, she admitted that she’d recognized one of the men in the photo lineup. She said she used to see him occasionally at one of the drug houses in the neighborhood. “There was a lot of drugs and sex going on in the house,” she said, “and I remember him because he was strange. He never had sex with any of the girls, and he used crack cocaine; nobody else in the house was using crack at that time.” She said she’d been worried about admitting her drug use to the detectives.

This time, when Sweet showed her the photo lineup, Tanya didn’t hesitate. She pointed to the photograph they’d seen her staring at the day before. The photograph of David Penton. “That’s him.”

After leaving Tanya’s, Sweet thought about Penton’s comment during the interview that he was using a lot of crack cocaine back in the mid-1980s and that he could have committed the murders but “forgot” because he was so high. He knew that was a bullshit excuse, but his admitted drug use bolstered Tanya’s account. She had also corroborated Creighton’s story about Penton socializing in the neighborhood where Roxann was abducted.

There were two more items of importance that came about from the trip to Ohio. One of them had to do with a comment Sunnycalb had made to Sweet regarding the abduction of Tiffany Ibarra. He said that Penton had told him he’d been in possession of a “bag phone,” the precursor to cell phones, and that he’d let the girl make a call to her mother from it. The phone, according to Penton, had belonged to his employer, Wayne Welch.

While in Ohio, Sweet and Meeks located Welch’s ex-wife, who verified that her former husband had a bag phone and she confirmed that sometimes Penton was given the device to use for work. She said she had kept all the records from the phone company and promised to try to find them.

While a seemingly minor detail, the bag phone was the nexus between what Tiffany and Theresa Ibarra had told police in 1986 and repeated to Sweet, Bradshaw, and Phillips in October, and what Sunnycalb claimed Penton had said. If there had not been a bag phone—if Tiffany had made it all up—then Penton wouldn’t have known about it, nor could he have said anything to Sunnycalb in that regard.

The last benefit from that trip to Ohio involved Bradshaw and Phillips. When Sweet and Meeks went to Minford, the other two had returned to the prison in Marion to interview more inmates to see if Penton had boasted of his crimes there. They’d talked to several of Penton’s friends, but with no success. The detectives then left to meet up with Sweet and Meeks in Columbus.

However, soon after leaving, the detectives received a call from one of the prison investigators. He said that an inmate named Clay Krcal had just contacted him and asked if the detectives were at the prison to talk about Penton. Apparently, word had got around already. Krcal told the investigator that Penton had talked to him about several murders. The investigator was calling to see if they wanted to return to the prison to speak to the inmate; he didn’t have to ask twice.

Krcal was an interesting character. He’d been employed by the National Football League but had embezzled league money, which is how he’d ended up in prison. He was working in the prison library when he got to know Penton, a frequent visitor.

Krcal told Bradshaw and Phillips that Penton had once confessed that he’d killed Nydra Ross and tried to outwit police investigators by taking a hair from a comb belonging to someone else and leaving it on her body. He said Penton told him he’d also tried this trick with murders he’d committed in Texas and North Carolina.

More recently, Penton had come to him asking for help researching modern methods of DNA analysis, Krcal said. A lot had changed in the science between 1988 and 2003, and he was worried that the new technology might get him caught for the Texas murders.

Taken singularly, bits and pieces of evidence and potential testimony, such as Krcal’s, didn’t amount to much. But as pieces of a larger puzzle, they created a picture of a killer realizing that his boasts about being smarter than the cops might be coming back to haunt him. And Sweet was determined to find as many of those small and large pieces as possible.

In January, he’d followed up on a promise he’d made to himself to correct a past mistake. He drove the forty-five minutes to Wanda Huggins’ mobile home and took a sworn statement from the old woman. This time, she did remember him and repeated what she’d told him the first time. Then, finally, it had been time to give the case to Assistant District Attorney Davis to take to the Collin County grand jury.

Originally, the detectives planned to have the case presented to the Dallas District Attorney’s Office to seek an indictment. Roxann Reyes and Christie Proctor had both been abducted from that county. However, during the investigation, Davis, who’d been with the Dallas DAO, went to work for the Collin County DAO, and they wanted to keep the cases with him. The remains of Roxann and Christie were found in Collin County so there was no problem with jurisdiction. Because Plano was located in Collin County, Det. Meeks volunteered to do the paperwork necessary to present the cases.

When Collin County District Attorney John Roach announced his office was seeking to charge Penton, he told the
Dallas Morning News
that he was confident the grand jurors would return three murder indictments.
“And if they do that,”
he said for a story that appeared May 22, 2003,
“we intend to seek the death penalty.”

The newspaper talked to the girls’ families, who expressed both sadness and gratitude that the day of reckoning was finally at hand.
“Thank you, Lord,”
Linda Meeks, Christi’s mother, said.
“It’s been a long time coming, a long 18 years. I’m shocked, nervous, scared — all rolled into one.”

She said that she’d suffered an emotional breakdown in the months after her daughter’s body was found. She’d buried the horror of the loss so deep
“that I had to have my sister show me where Christi’s grave was later on.”
But, she said, she never gave up hope.
“I just thought, ‘If he doesn’t get his day here on earth, he’ll get it on judgment day when he leaves this earth.’”

She added that she hoped that her daughter’s death might have helped other potential victims.
“In a roundabout way, it helped bring in media attention and public awareness,”
she said.
“It showed that it could happen to anybody. It’s not because you didn’t watch your child.”

Christi’s father, Mike Meeks, told the newspaper,
“the whole family is hurt and relieved by it all,”
particularly Christi’s brother, Michael.
“It’s affected my son and he’s felt guilty about this for so long. It’ll be a great comfort for him.”

Also interviewed by the newspaper, Michael Meeks described the years following his sister’s abduction as
“torture. I haven’t been able to do anything right in a long time. I need this for myself, and I need this for my children. I think it’s going to help a lot.”

Tammy Lopez told the newspaper that prosecuting Roxann’s killer after so many years would be a relief.
“I know he’s not going to go through the pain like my little girl did — or those other two little girls — but it’s comforting to know he’ll get what’s coming to him.”

Lopez said her family had been waiting for fifteen years for the police to put together the case against Penton.
“My mother and stepfather saw this guy’s picture in a paper”
when he was charged with killing Nydra Ross in Ohio.
“It matched a composite drawing released”
by Garland police.
“But I’ve been told to say no more right now so it won’t spoil the case,”
she said.
“I want this guy put down for what he did.”

In a press release, District Attorney Roach praised the police detectives from Garland, Mesquite, and Plano,
“who are to be commended for their dedication, hard work, and coordinated investigation in preparing and presenting these cases for prosecution.”

“The acceptance and prosecution of these cases will serve as notice to anyone who would abduct and murder our children that we will not forget. We will not forget the killer; we will not forget the crime; and we will not forget the victims.”

Meanwhile, the detectives who had worked so long and hard on the case waited nervously to hear the outcome of the grand jury proceedings. They were confident of the cases they’d put together. But they knew that there were no guarantees that there would be an indictment, or if there were, that they’d win at trial.

During grand jury proceedings, only the prosecution presents evidence. No defense attorney presents contradicting evidence or cross-examines the witnesses as the defense would at trial. The threshold a prosecutor faces to ask grand jurors to return an indictment also is lower than what would be required to convict a defendant at trial. A conviction in a trial would require that the prosecution prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt after the defense had done its best to dispute the evidence. However, for an indictment, which was necessary to have the defendant charged with the crime and bound over for trial, the prosecution only had to prove that if the prosecution’s case was not successfully contradicted by the defense, a trial jury would be likely to find the defendant guilty.

Among those subpoenaed to testify was Penton’s mother. If the grand jury indicted Penton, he would be arrested and a defense attorney would be assigned to his case. Davis wanted Penton’s mother on the record and under oath before she had a chance to get together with her son’s lawyer.

Three weeks after the grand jury began hearing testimony, Sweet’s telephone rang. Five years earlier, he’d been the only detective in the office when first one phone and then another rang, until finally Roxann Reyes’s mother reached the detective who knew the tragic story hidden in two file boxes of the Garland Police Department murder closet, waiting for someone to care. Others might call it coincidence. He believed it was divine intervention.

This time, the call came straight to him. It was from Greg Davis; the bogeyman was going to be tried for murdering three little girls.

Hanging up with Davis, Sweet punched in another number. It was time to tell Bruce Bradshaw that his long wait was coming to a close.